ROME, JUNE 11 – The ordeal of prisoners in Bahrain, the country with the highest percentage of detainees across the entire Middle East, often starts with a police raid in a home or a checkpoint operation which turns into a real abduction, a report published on Wednesday said. The person taken away simply disappears – sometimes for 24 hours or for months, according to the study published by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR). Those arrested reportedly find themselves ”locked inside a nightmare”.

In the three years since the beginning of the protest movement in favour of democracy which started in February 2011, the report said, Bahrain‘s prison population has increased exponentially. BCHR reportedly documented thousands of arbitrary detentions, most of which followed forced disappearances, and a long list of human rights violations, including torture.

However, testimony provided by hundreds of former inmates and the families of dead prisoners trace a dramatic and inhumane profile of what is going on inside Bahrain’s prisons.

There are four detention centres: the worse, according to those interviewed, is the Central investigative direction (CID).

The Isa Town Women Prison has for the most part a population of female detainees who are foreign workers and don’t speak Arabic nor English and in many cases ignore the reason why they are being detained.

In general, women represent 18.5% of the total prison population.

But the saddest chapter, according to the report jointly drafted by BCHR and the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, is the fate of detained minors. Bahrain’s authorities are reportedly keeping minors in unhealthy conditions together with adults, the study said.

Since January, 70 cases of detained children aged 11 or older have been documented. Some of them have been jailed on terrorism charges, the report said.

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights publish today a report detailing prison conditions in Bahrain. This report brings the voices of current and former detainees directly to the UN Human Rights Council through first person accounts, and images that have been smuggled out of these prisons. The report will be officially presented today at 5:00 pm CET during the HRC26 side event in Geneva: Bahrain: Empty Promises, Crowded Prisons. A link to the side session can be found below: here.

Bahraini investigations into two recent deaths, including a May 22, 2014 incident in which security forces shot and fatally wounded a 14-year-old boy, should be swift, thorough, and impartial. Authorities should prosecute in good faith anyone found responsible for unlawful use of force in that incident as well as the incident on February 23 that left a 28 year old with injuries that led to his death on April 18. His body remains in the mortuary because his family is refusing to sign a death certificate that makes no mention of the gunshot wounds to the head that doctors told them killed him: here.